Eli Lilly

At Eli Lilly's Lilly-Branchburg plant in New Jersey—a 24/7 facility dedicated to manufacturing advanced cancer therapies and clinical-trial biopharmaceuticals—operators depended on thick-client HMI workstations physically located inside ISO-classified clean manufacturing suites. Because biopharmaceutical molecules can contain 2,000 to 25,000 atoms, any lapse in process visibility creates significant batch risk. Workers and supervisors had to gown up in protective suits every time they needed to check production status, complicating routine troubleshooting and instrument calibration. When a thick-client workstation failed, recovery required technicians to re-enter the clean area, apply OS patches, validate antivirus software, and cycle through several manual steps—consuming four to eight hours and creating unacceptable downtime exposure for a facility producing life-critical therapies.

Eli Lilly, working with Rockwell Automation, deployed FactoryTalk View Site Edition (SE) software paired with a virtualized, thin-client architecture using VMware View, enabling operators and supervisors to access HMI displays from anywhere on the process or corporate network—outside the clean suite entirely. Allen-Bradley ControlLogix controllers standardized control across both manufacturing suites, while FactoryTalk Historian collected real-time sensor and process data at the machine level and fed it up to a site-level server, enabling remote batch analysis and historian access for the manufacturing technology group. The project followed a three-phased rollout designed around production schedules, with dedicated server space isolated per suite so changes in one area would not affect another. Redundant server configuration ensured that even a server-level failure triggered automatic failover in under a second. Assessment and technology selection took approximately eight months before deployment began.

HMI recovery time collapsed from four to eight hours to under five minutes—a greater than 95% reduction—eliminating the need to gown up and manually reconfigure failed workstations in the clean area. Key outcomes:

• HMI recovery: 4–8 hours → <5 minutes
• Development and deployment time: 70% reduction projected for second-suite modernization
• Instrument calibration: reduced from a two-person task to a single operator with a mobile HMI client at the instrument
• Workforce productivity: supervisors can remotely verify production run status and team readiness without entering the suite

Remote historian access also allowed the manufacturing technology group to compare live batches against expected process standards, supporting ongoing process verification and parameter testing.

• Thin-client virtualized HMI architectures give pharmaceutical manufacturers a proven path to eliminating clean-room access bottlenecks—recovery and troubleshooting can occur without gowning up.
• Standardizing on a single control platform across suites is the multiplier: it's what made a 70% projected time reduction on subsequent deployments achievable.
• Per-suite server isolation is critical in multi-suite facilities—changes to one production area should not propagate to another.
• Integrated historian infrastructure turns real-time sensor data into a live process verification tool, enabling remote batch comparison against expected standards.
• A phased rollout aligned to production schedules minimizes operational risk during HMI modernization in around-the-clock manufacturing environments.